1950s

The Farmers Market at the corner of 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, around 1953. Image courtesy of the University of Southern California Libraries and the California Historical Society.

The view in 2015:

The Farmers Market in Los Angeles opened in 1934, and since then it has become a major landmark in the city. Originally, it consisted of a few farmers who parked their trucks here on the property and sold produce, but over the years it grew into a permanent facility as seen in these two photos. The property was owned by Earl Gilmore, the son of Los Angeles oil magnate Arthur F. Gilmore, who also built the nearby Gilmore Stadium and Gilmore Field in the 1930s. The light towers of Gilmore Field can be seen in the distance on the left side of the first photo; it was home to the Hollywood Stars minor league baseball team from 1939 until 1957, and was demolished in 1958 after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and brought Major League Baseball to the West Coast.

Because of its proximity to Hollywood, the Farmers Market has attracted its share of celebrities. Around the time that the first photo was taken, stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner as well as Dwight D. Eisenhower all made appearances here, and this trend has continued over the years. Today, the market’s exterior appearance has not changed significantly since the first photo. With a variety of restaurants and other vendors, it is a popular tourist destination, and is in many ways comparable to the much older Quincy Market in Boston.

This post is part of a series of photos that I took in California this past winter. Click here to see the other posts in the “Lost New England Goes West” series.

The dining hall at the Alcatraz Federal Penitentary, sometime between 1933 and 1963. Image courtesy of the National Park Service.

The dining hall in 2015:

This dining hall is part of the main prison building at Alcatraz, which first opened in 1912 as a military prison. The first photo, taken during its time as a federal civilian prison, shows the dining hall set up for some sort of holiday dinner. All of the inmates ate their meals here together, and the food was supposedly the best in the entire federal prison system. Meals were 20 minutes long, and inmates could help themselves to as much food as they wanted, provided that they ate it in time and left no waste.

In the distance on the far left of the 2015 photo is the breakfast menu from March 21, 1963, the prison’s last day in operation. The meal consisted of assorted dry cereals, steamed whole wheat, scrambled eggs, milk, stewed fruit. toast, bread, butter, and coffee. Today, the dining hall is one of the stops on the self-guided tour of the island, which is operated by the National Park Service as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

This post is part of a series of photos that I took in California this past winter. Click here to see the other posts in the “Lost New England Goes West” series.

The Church of the Unity, photographed in 1959. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey collection.

The same view in 2014:

The Church of the Unity is also featured in this post, although the photo in that one is close to 100 years older than this “before” one is. As mentioned there, this church was significant as the first commission of architect Henry Hobson Richardson, and was built between 1866 and 1869. However, it was demolished only two years after this photo was taken, and was replaced with a parking lot for the Springfield Public Library.

Robbins Reef Light in New York Harbor, in 1951. Photo courtesy of United States Coast Guard.

The lighthouse in 2012:

Built in 1883 to replace an earlier structure, Robbins Reef Light is situated in New York Harbor, near the route of the Staten Island Ferry, which is where the second photo was taken. Now deactivated, the lighthouse has clearly seen better days, especially when compared to the 1951 photo. However, in 2011 it was sold to a museum in order to preserve the historic lighthouse.

A football game at Fenway Park, sometime between 1947 and 1956. Photo courtesy of Boston Public Library.

The same view in 2006:

As mentioned in my previous post, football was a common occurrence at Fenway Park. However, this photo was taken a couple decades after the other one – a couple telltale signs are the right field bullpens and the light tower, which was not added to Fenway until 1947. I don’t know the exact date of the first photo, or whether this was a college or professional game, but it could be a Boston Yanks game. The Yanks were a short-lived NFL team that played at Fenway Park from 1944 to 1948, which would put it within the time frame of the first photo, and the scoreboard above the bleachers has “Boston” and “Visitor” as the two teams, which suggests this was a professional team that regularly played home games here.

The corner of Blackstone Street and Hanover Street, in 1956. Photo courtesy of Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The same corner in 2011:

There’s something rather depressing about comparing these two photos – the bustling marketplace, contrasted with the shuttered storefronts and empty streets. However, the appearance neighborhood as a whole has improved significantly since 1956 – the first photo was actually taken right in front of the Central Artery – the massive elevated highway that was eventually replaced by the much-maligned yet more aesthetically pleasing Big Dig. Where I was standing to take the 2011 photo is right about where the highway ran through – if I had taken the photo 10 years earlier, the buildings in the foreground would’ve been barely visible.

I hadn’t seen the 1956 photo before taking this photo; what drew me to the building was the fading 19th century advertisements still visible on the bricks. The two most prominent are for Bostonia Cigars (top and right-hand side), and W.P.B. Brooks & Co. Furniture Carpets &c. I couldn’t find out much about either company, but it appears both from the appearance of the advertisements and also some quick online searches about the companies that they existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The building itself, which was constructed around 1835, is actually the same building that has the Boston Stone mounted on its wall, on the opposite side of where this photo was taken. Behind it is the Blackstone Block, a rare group of buildings from the 18th and 19th century that still maintains the original 1600’s street network. It is completely surrounded by much newer construction, but it is a small enclave of historic structures. On the opposite side of this area is one of Boston’s oldest buildings, the home of the Union Oyster House.

This building itself actually used to have more floors, but at some point before the 1956 photo it was trimmed down to just three. However, recent photos of this same building taken in the past year have shown that a couple more floors have actually been added on to the top of it, which would suggest that its future is brighter than the boarded up storefronts and deserted streets would seem to suggest.

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